Postgraduate Study

Masters and doctoral programmes in Modern Languages and Film Studies are administered centrally. You'll find comprehensive information about programmes and module requirements and about the support available to postgraduate students on the Department's Postgraduate Page.

German has a strong research culture and an international reputation with 85% of research classified of international quality in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.

We are particularly known for our published work on the medieval lyric, the culture of the Reformation and Baroque, 18th- and 19th-century cultural and literary studies, including comparative literature and scholarly editing, literature of the FRG and GDR as well as Wendeliteratur and women's writing. Numerous important research publications have emerged from our research staff on Oswald von Wolkenstein, Baroque court festivities, Schiller, Nestroy, Gutzkow, Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal, the history of German and Austrian comedy, Anglo-German intellectual relations in the 19th century, and post-1945 writers. Approximately a quarter of the standard critical edition of Nestroy has been edited here, and German Studies at Exeter is the home of the internet-based edition of the works of Karl Gutzkow, Kommentierte digitale Gesamtausgabe of Gutzkows Werke und Briefe. 

Recent successes in funding applications include four AHRC Research leave awards (Lesley Sharpe, Sara Smart, Chloe Paver and Gert Vonhoff), major conference support from the Austrian Institute for the Vienna meets Berlin festival (Ulrike Zitzlsperger) and an MHRA Research Associateship in support of the Gutzkow edition project.

Through research, contacts have been established with a number of German and Austrian universities, including Göttingen, Würzburg, Bielefeld, Augsburg, Halle, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Innsbruck and Vienna, and research institutes such as the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach.

The main strengths of the University Library's German collection lie in the literature and cultural background of the 18th to 20th centuries. Austrian literature and cultural history are strongly represented, and the Library possesses Schnitzler's very large collection of press-cuttings, assembled from the early 1890s until his death in 1931, a unique source for the documentation of his reception; it is now available on microfiche. The Library also possesses the Bibliothek der deutschen Literatur, a huge collection of primary literature from the 17th to the later 19th century on microfiche, and is one of only a few British libraries outside Oxford and Cambridge to hold this valuable research resource.

German offers postgraduates a friendly and supportive environment for research. There is a regular research seminar and postgraduates have an opportunity to teach undergraduates.

Staff Research Interests

• Dr Helen Bridge: Post-war literature, particularly that of the German Democratic Republic; Rilke and literature around 1900.

• Professor Martina Lauster: 19th-century German and European literature.

• Dr Chloe Paver: The post-war German novel; literature since reunification; narrative theory; cultural memory of the Third Reich.

• Professor Ricarda Schmidt: Romanticism; post-1945 German literature; Victorian and 20th-century British literature.

• Professor Lesley Sharpe: 18th-century German literature; Schiller; women's writing; theatre history.

• Dr Sara Smart: Literature and culture of the 17th and early 18th centuries, particularly court writing and entertainments.

• Dr Gert Vonhoff: 18th- and 19th-century literature; narratology; Editionsphilologie.

• Dr Ulrike Zitzlsperger: Pamphlets and gender-related studies of the German Reformation period; Berlin in the 20th century, with particular emphasis on the 1920s and 1990s.

Contact details

For further information about research degrees in German, please contact:

Professor Lesley Sharpe ( This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it ), German Studies, Department of Modern Languages (contact details).